I've just finished up three hours of the most difficult radio I've
ever had to do. The topic, of course, was the horrific shooting in
Tucson, which has deeply affected me, as it has many others. As someone
who had to flee the Capitol on 9/11, was warned of anthrax contamination
in the congressional office I was working in, and has faced various
threats of violence during my media career, I was shaken by the scenes
in Arizona more so than by any other news imagery in a long time.

The reason the radio show was so difficult this morning was because
of the reaction. It was a telling commentary about the larger problems
embodied by the weekend's events.

My points this morning were simple: We know
that some conservative media and political leaders often use their
platforms to endorse violence as political expression, and both those
leaders and all of us in media and politics need to reflect on the
inevitable real-world consequences of that reality. Indeed, if we cannot
reflect on this after this weekend, when can we?

This should be a point of consensus among the left and right.
Regardless of what crazy theories motivated the Tucson shooter, and
regardless of how insane he obviously is, we know our culture is now
regularly infused with the radical notion that says political motives --
whatever they are -- can be legitimately expressed with violence. We
know this because the examples are everywhere - and because Rep. Gabrielle Giffords explicitly warned of the "consequences."
And we should know that when you mix inevitably crazy people with
notions that violence is acceptable politics, you are bound to get
violence. This isn't esoteric sociological theory -- it's basic common
sense.

For my part, I spent a lot of the morning sincerely apologizing,
telling listeners that if I have ever even seemed to have contributed to
violent rhetoric in the past, I am deeply sorry. I made this point over
and over again, noting that when I was first offered the opportunity in
radio two years ago, my primary hesitation in taking the job was about
going into a business that seems so focused on invective. I knew then,
as I know now, that our media -- and particularly our electronic media
-- rewards such vitriol, much of it seeming to endorse violence. That
knowledge haunts me every day, and so after this shooting, I apologized
on my own behalf if I have ever accidentally contributed to it, while
also providing some key indisputable examples of how that violent rhetoric is now everywhere -- and especially emanating these days from the fringe right.

While we received a lot of calls this morning that fundamentally
agreed with the seemingly uncontroversial premise that our culture now
regularly endorses violence, we also received a wave of hate mail from
conservatives who insist it is out of line to even raise questions about
that culture. Next to the terrible death and injury from the shooting,
this effective demand for silence -- this insistence that questions must
not be asked and that remorse must not be expressed -- is the most
depressing part of the entire Tucson episode.

As we've learned so many times throughout history, silence is
complicity and defensiveness is ideological endorsement. We are now
learning that lesson today.

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When, for instance, Sarah Palin responds to the shooting by scrubbing her website
but not by apologizing for her violent imagery aimed at Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords, that simultaneously says she knows she may be partially
responsible for violent culture, but unwilling to state that publicly so
as to change that culture.

When right-wing radio hosts follow a murderous rampage by pretending
they -- and not the dead -- are the victim, they are by omission
suggesting that they somehow have a god-given right to hijack the public
airwaves and use them for explicitly violent incitement.

When a Republican senator admits to Politico
that "there is a need for some reflection here" but then refuses to
make that comment on the record, it says the GOP knows we have a problem
but isn't serious about stopping it.

When Beltway reporters
insist we shouldn't necessarily see a planned and targeted
assassination attempt as political or terrorism and further, shouldn't
ascribe blame to any political movements, they are sanitizing the
episode as some freakish event we should all simply get used to.

And when conservative radio-show callers spend their energy berating
questions about our violent culture rather than berating their own
leaders for endorsing that culture, they are willfully avoiding
inconvenient truths and effectively endorsing the new violent normal in
America. Why? Because that normal serves conservative ends by expressly
suggesting to anyone who is not a conservative (read: Democrats and
progressives) that they should legitimately fear being gunned down for
their political beliefs.

That's what this episode really is: A reflection of a terrifying
reality, not a creation of it; a mirror on our country, not a distortion
of it. A state whose most famous politician once insisted that
"extremism is no vice" has now become a "mecca for prejudice and
bigotry" -- a mecca that is also unfortunately a microcosm.

The fact
that so many are now trying to ramrod this tragedy into red-versus-blue
talking points, trying to save face, and trying to avoid expressing any
personal remorse/apology for fear of admitting imperfection -- all of
that is America's now tried and true way of avoiding the most painful
realization we don't want to face: We have met the enemy, and he is us.